Join our photo lessons at Deep Cut Gardens, a 54-acre garden in Middletown, New Jersey, offering a changing mix of flowers, formal landscapes, wooded areas, water features, and architectural details throughout the year.
Deep Cut Gardens gives photographers a wide variety of subjects within one location, from carefully arranged flower beds and formal gardens to woodland paths, ponds, stonework, and open lawns. Your Digital Photo Academy instructor can help you experiment with composition while deciding whether to photograph the larger landscape or concentrate on smaller details within the garden.
One of the highlights is the formal rose parterre, where geometric pathways, clipped hedges, roses, and a pergola create opportunities to practice symmetry, leading lines, patterns, and depth. Try photographing straight down a pathway for a balanced composition, then change your position or focal length to isolate individual flowers against a softer background.
Throughout the gardens, seasonal flowers and cultivated plants provide excellent subjects for practicing close-up photography. Your instructor can demonstrate how aperture affects depth of field and how changing your camera angle can simplify a busy background. Look closely for color, texture, repeating shapes, and contrasts between flowers, foliage, stone walls, and other garden features.
Water features, ponds, and shaded areas provide another set of photographic possibilities. Experiment with reflections, foreground elements, and compositions that combine plants with the surrounding landscape. Woodland and meadow areas also offer opportunities to practice using paths, trees, and natural layers to create a sense of depth within the frame.
Because Deep Cut Gardens is designed as a living collection of native and cultivated plants, the scenery changes throughout the seasons. Spring flowers, summer roses and greenery, fall foliage, and the year-round greenhouse give photographers different subjects to explore on repeat visits.
Meeting Spot:
Recommended meeting location: outside the Deep Cut Gardens Horticultural Center, near the main garden entrance.
Deep Cut Gardens
152 Red Hill Road
Middletown, NJ 07748
The gardens are open daily year-round from 8 a.m. until dusk.
Know Before You Go:
Please bring your DSLR or another type of digital camera that you use, a fully-charged battery, and the equipment that you can carry. You should dress for the weather and wear comfortable shoes.
Each Composition in the Field class begins with a talk with one of our experienced instructors, and then you and your fellow students take a stroll through one of a variety of photogenic locales (in any of the 20+ cities the DPA encapsulates). There is street photography, magnificent interiors, farmers markets, zoos, landscapes, and more, photos of which are included within. These photos are a mix of student and instructor images in many different venues and cities across the United States and Canada.
You will have fun, learn to shoot strategically, get more interesting photos of the event, and walk away with a foundation to improve your photographs in the future, whether you’re traveling, or at a birthday party and everywhere in between.
Please note: If a class must be cancelled due to weather or other circumstances beyond our control we will be happy to work with you to reschedule. If you should need to cancel and require a new class date, contact us. A $25 transfer fee will be imposed without a 3 day notice before the scheduled class.
